Works in Progress

DGBooks Radio perhaps ought to stop at a playlist of 300 tracks. I remember Johnnie's Juke Box on Sounds of the 70's was going to, and then didn't. It's not really a selection if you include everything so apart from when I become aware of glaring omissions, of which there will be some, maybe that will do.

I can't see the playlist below the first six and already can't remember exactly what I put on and what I didn't. There must be a way of doing it but it's like not being sure which books or records one has. Andrew Motion's book on Edward Thomas? I'd have thought so but I can't find it. That Sebastian Faulks novel I bought twice? I was on about page 73 before realizing I already had it. I'd have been no better at being an academic than I would a librarian.

 

But there are reasons to be cheerful. Attempts at writing novels are discouraged by the idea that a 'novel' should be at least 50 thousand words. I know it's all wrong and one should write as much as needs to be written but a big, and very bad, reason for trying to write a novel was to be able to say I've written a novel. It's the same bad reason why there are so many bad novels, bad poems and bad pop songs not all written by me.

A 'book' of poetry commentary isn't defined by its word count, though. Anthony Thwaite's Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Heinemann, 1978) wasn't a big book although it could only cover its period up until its publication date. It's a summary at best - there weren't that many about at the time- and gets as far as Heaney had got by then. It wasn't much use then and is less now.

It's 125 pages of text, say 33 lines a page and 10 words per line = 41250 words.

Neil Corcoran's English Poetry since 1940 (Longman, 1993) is more expansive at 260 pages of about 42 lines of approx. 10 words = 109200 words.

Corcoran brings in a lot of names. Thwaite gives three pages to Edward Thomas and ends with the quote from Yeats that 'we are too many' that he made into a poem either before or after as an observation on contemporary poetry.

Any survey, like any anthology, has to stop somewhere and immediately give rise to readers and reviewers asking why their favourites, Wilf Subbuteo or Francesca Scrimshaw, weren't mentioned.

So, let's hold a high line and make our way through C20th English poetry via 'major' writers and take a view, encouraged by the fact that a minor major figure like Thwaite, capable of considerable industry when editing the Larkin letters, thought 42000 would be enough.

There is no point in imagining one can be definitve and so one writes up what it looks like in a subjective way.

It is possible to find unforeseen connections between poems one thought dissimilar and also differences between poets one might have thought had plenty in common. It remains worth doing, gradually and in defiance of abandonment so perhaps it's a work in progress that might make it to be a ramshackle first draft one day.

That day would arrive sooner if I set about doing more of it instrad of writing about writing it but one needs to let such things gestate, be thought about and then, eventually, when all else fails, do a bit more of.